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Early depictions of Cidade Velha's sear-frontage show a thriving, well-appointed and heavily fortified town with architectural aspirations: ships ride at anchor, the cathedral and Bishop's Palace can be seen below the plateau-top fort on the east side of the valley, the harbour is ringed with batteries, behind which poke a number of two-storey residences and church towers. The crucial point is that, as the early capital of the Cape Verde Islands, located some 350 nautical miles off the West African coast and being Portugal's main transshipment centre for the trans-Atlantic trade, all this was carried on a slavery-based infrastructure. This chapter consists of three parts. First it outlines the history of slavery from a Cape Verdean perspective. Second, it discusses interviews conducted with the local residents as they indicate how the past of slavery may affect contemporary attitudes and the values associated with the historical remains. Third, it provides a brief summary of the archaeological work started in Cidade Velha.

The Portuguese maritime expansion from the 15th century led to interactions and trade between Europeans and Africans. In places where the Portuguese established permanent bases, social interaction with Africans entailed processes of biological and cultural mixing, the outcome of which varied significantly depending on the different geographic, demographic, political and linguistic circumstances. In particular historical and social-cultural contexts, acculturation assumed the form of creolisation, a concept that is defined as a process of ethnicisation and indiginisation whereby former ethnic identities disappear and are replaced by a new ethnic identity. According to this definition, Creole societies only emerged in the archipelagos of Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, but not in the Rivers of Guinea, where creolisation only partly occurred with regard to one particular group. Creole cultures did not emerge in Kongo or Angola either, where local cultures and languages remained largely intact.

This chapter concerns what is arguably one of the first European-built Christian churches in the Tropics, the N.^a S.^a da Conceição, in Ribeira Grande (now known as Cidade Velha), the former capital of the Cape Verde Islands. It briefly covers the early history of the town and then proceeds to consider its earliest church. The evidence of historical documents is first outlined, and thereafter the results from the first explorative archaeological investigations focussed on the physical remains of the building are summarised. The excavations were successful in locating the early church, which can now be reconstructed as a large, one-and-a-half or two storey high, east‐west oriented building with a vaulted side-chapel on its northern side and buttressed corners on its western façade. Two tombstones found in situ within the floor confirm that the building dates to, at least, the early 16th century.

This chapter on elections and electoral systems in Cape Verde follows the same format as all the other country chapters in the book. The first section is introductory and contains a historical overview, discussion of the evolution of electoral provisions, an account of the current electoral provisions, and a comment on the electoral statistics. The second section consists of ten tables. These are: 2.1 Dates of National Elections, Referendums, and Coups d’Etat (there have been no referendums of coups d’états); 2.2 Electoral Body 1975–1996 (data on population size, registered voters, and votes cast); 2.3 Abbreviations (abbreviations and full names of political parties and alliances used in tables 2.6, 2.7, and 2.9); 2.4 Electoral Participation of Parties and Alliances 1975–1996 (participation of political parties and alliances in chronological order and including the years and number of contested elections); 2.5 Referendums (none held); 2.6 Elections for Constitutional Assembly 1975 (details of registered voters and votes cast nationally and regionally); 2.7 Parliamentary Elections 1980–1995 (details of registered voters and votes cast nationally and regionally); 2.8 Composition of Parliament 1980–1995; 2.9 Presidential Elections 1991–1996 (details of registered voters and votes cast nationally and regionally); and 2.10 List of Power Holders 1975–1998.

This chapter deals with the hermeneutic understanding of Cape Verdean postcolonial reality through popular music. It provides an analysis of the relationship between globalization, the world music scene, and Cape Verdean contemporary music, highlighting prominent world music icon Cesária Évora. The commodification of Évora’s music is said to be largely associated with the overall globalization of Cape Verdean music. The chapter also explores some of the important facets of Cape Verdean music—the musical style, artists, composers, lyrics, and infrastructure, within the context of local and global forces. Cape Verdean music is derived from a combination of Euro-African musical forms and is notable for being transnational, which makes it worthy of critical study as part of understanding Cape Verde’s national identity and culture as a whole.

We study how globalization and governance (G&G) interact with convergence given Cape Verde and Mozambique’s particular geographical and historical contexts. We identify macro-level policy and institutional combinations underpinning successful trade diversification (an indicator of globalization) and income convergence (an indicator of governance) in the sub-regions of West and Southern Africa. We assess the extent to which these combinations apply to both countries using an empirical analysis and find that trade openness drives convergence and export diversification in Western Africa (which is becoming more diversified) while convergence is instead driven by economic and political freedoms in Southern Africa (which is becoming more specialized). Our empirical analysis is complemented by a case-study narrative of Cape Verde and Mozambique’s long-term development, which allows us to also identify several common drivers. Moreover, both countries reveal convergence compared to their sub-regional peers when looking at average GDP per capita and indicators of financial reputation and good governance. While these findings are insufficient to conclude that convergence will be sustained, the positive interaction between trade and financial globalization, on the one hand, and good governance and democracy, on the other, may help explain the observed diversity of the Portuguese-speaking African community.

This chapter provides historical depth to the claim of a Creole citizenship by analyzing the spatial presence of Africanity inside Lisbon as well as Portugal's special relationship with Cape Verde. It first discusses Creole's historical presences in Portugal before turning to state representations of Africanity and space. It then considers Creole citizenship in Cape Verde, along with Lisbon spatiality and colonial management of space, language, and education. It also examines Kriolu as a language and identity and as a unique formation in Portuguese colonialism. Finally, it assesses the link between racialization and labor practices in the context of citizenship. It argues that Creole has been a significant presence in the formation of “Portuguese” identity, created by encounters and displacements that occurred between Portugal and West and Central Western Africa.

In 1541, Roger Barlow, an English merchant who had traded with Spain's Atlantic settlements from Seville in the 1520s, presented Henry VIII with a cosmography containing his personal account of the Rio de la Plata, inserted into an English translation of the 1519 edition of the Suma de Geographia by Martin Fernandez de Enciso. Despite the fact that both men had been involved in the buying and selling of West African slaves, Barlow translated Enciso's short description of the slave markets in Guinea without comment. This chapter explores how the trading network of English, Spanish and Genoese merchants Barlow belonged to had traded in slaves and associated products, such as pearls and sugar, since the 1480s. In doing so, they were instrumental in linking the ‘Guinea of Cape Verde’ to the wider Atlantic world.

This explores how the fraught and troubled historical links between sexuality and politics through a reading of Cape Verdean novelist Germano Almeida’s Eva. The paradox between the unrepeatable instance and its incessant “iterability” underpins the novel’s representation of two metaphorically linked domains of experience: politics and sexuality. I suggest that this repetitive or compulsive performativity relates directly to a sustained interrogation of the contradictory and often precarious dialogic entanglements that inform the constitution (or “performances”) of Cape Verdean (national, racial, gender) identity within a broad South Atlantic cultural and geopolitical space that encompasses not only Portugal (as the former colonial power), but also Brazil and continental Africa. Thus, the novel consistently refuses (sometimes in problematic ways) to fix identity in unequivocal terms and muddles the corporeal signs of absolute alterity that we routinely imagine to be located in the bodies of “others.”

This chapter surveys various groups in western and central Africa that self-proclaimed a Jewish identity. These include the Zakhor Jews of Timbuktu, Mali; the Igbo of Nigeria; the House of Israel of Ghana; the The Tutsi-Hebrews of Havilah; and the Cape Verde-Israel Friendship Society.

This book examines the history of rap music expressed in Cape Verdean Kriolu in Portugal. Kriolu is a hybrid language spoken by all Cape Verdeans, either native to the archipelago or located in diasporic communities. It emerged in the late fifteenth century through Portuguese colonialism in West Africa and as a result of the Iberian expulsion of Jews and Muslims under the purview of the Spanish Inquisition. Drawing on fieldwork and archival research in Portugal and Cape Verde, this book offers an account of Kriolu rappers in Lisbon and their roles in challenging and potentially transforming metropolitan Portuguese identities. It extends Christian Joppke's interpretation of citizenship in terms of migration by making the encounter the theoretical focus. To this end, the book highlights Creole and grounds the theory in the unique experiences and histories of Cape Verdeans. Through its study of Kriolu rappers in Lisbon, the book illustrates the importance of creolization to identity formation and cultural production.

This chapter examines the new challenges of identity politics that arose after 1974 with the official end of Portuguese colonialism and the implosion of the Salazar-Caetano fascist regime. More specifically, it considers the ways that Cape Verdean Kriolu's conflicted essence both reinforces and interrupts the national paradigm of Portuguese belonging and inclusion represented in a host of Luso categories and discourses. The chapter first argues for the importance of Creole by using history, theory, and ethnography. It then discusses the power of Lusotropicalism as an organizing ideology that continues to inform Portuguese notions of national identity. It also looks at Kriolu rappers and their challenges to lusotropicalism and other Luso discourses, such as Lusofonia. Finally, it highlights the manners in which Kriolu has become a vehicle for difference and discontent in the former metropole of Lisbon.

This chapter examines the politics of space of Kriolu presence in Lisbon by focusing on the demolition and relocation campaigns engineered by city urbanization agencies. Space is an irreducible dimension of presence. Kriolu presence refers to the various manifestations of Cape Verde and Cape Verdeans in the metropole. Ths formation is one signifcant influence in the sentiment and management of what it means to be Portuguese and, by extension, European. Cape Verdean presence is historical and linguistic in nature, and forms part of a grounded politics, a struggle for recognition and enfranchisement based in the everyday realities of improvised infrastructure, state campaigns of relocation, and dynamic views on belonging. This chapter argues that there is a “Creole citizenship” emerging in Lisbon and that Kriolu plays an important role in elucidating the differences between autoconstructed neighborhoods and social or state-sponsored project housing. It emphasizes the significance of migration and housing by focusing on the processes of displacement and “emplacement.”

This chapter begins by discussing the outbound passage from Newport to Sierra Leone, with special attention paid to eighteenth-century navigation techniques. After discussing the Hare’s brief stop at Cape Verde, it examines the Godfrey’s initial activities in Sierra Leone, which included a visit to Bance (a.k.a. Bunce) Island, the main slave trading fort. Bance Island was owned by Scottish merchants based in London. In addition to the main fort in the Sierra Leone River, Bance Island operated a number of smaller trading establishments within about 100-mile radius. Godfrey visited to obtain information about the market. Soon afterward, Godfrey was attacked by a leopard, but escaped with only minor injuries. He also clashed with several of his crew, coming to blows with one of them. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the system of institutionalized violence that structured slave trading on the Upper Guinea Coast. Godfrey participated in this system, agreeing to execute an African trader on the deck of his ship.

This chapter is focused on the Atlantic islands (Madeira, the Azores, Cape Verde and the Guinea islands). It examines the original settlements and argues that the land tenure system and the economy exacerbated the problems of poverty, overpopulation and drought with the result that the islands became major providers of onward emigrants. The climate of Cape Verde and the frequency of earthquakes in the Azores also forced people to leave. The Guinea islands are different in that they have attracted in-migration of contract labourers rather than being a source of emigrants like the other islands.

This chapter examines the ideas and policies of interculturality in relation to Kriolu. Building on the argument that there exists something like “Creole citizenship” and that it influences what it is to be “Portuguese,” the chapter explores migration as a shaping force in the “host” country. To this end, it juxtaposes a set of life stories from Cape Verdean Kriolu rappers and their families against policy documents from the European Commission and the Portuguese state agency ACIDI. More specifically, it considers what Kriolu tells us about the state of multiculturalism and interculturality as examples of European community ideals and whether Kriolu might offer important insights into “intercultural competence.” The chapter makes the case that discussions of citizenship and migration necessitate a dialogue between experiences and policies.

This chapter presents some final thoughts. As a group, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São TomÉ and Príncipe represent an epitome of the African continent with splendid variations of population, land mass, geopolitical authority, and economic structure. In general, the book focuses on gaps in Lusophone Africa’s democratization process and the absence of total economic independence, albeit the political autonomy of its nation-states is undisputed. The outcome of Africa’s independence meant a transition from autocratic one-party states and integrated economies to market-oriented multiparty states, and is an indication of both a shortfall in social justice and abundance of idealistic hope.